NEWSMAKERS: S. Africa uniting behind rugby team

NewsmakersFor a time, South Africa can forget

Associated Press

Published 5:30 am, Friday, October 19, 2007

Photo: BENEDICTE KURZEN, ASSOCIATED PRESS

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A Soweto rugby club player, left, shakes hand with a player from Johannesburg's Enkuina team. The racial divide that has rocked rugby has faded to a whisper as the nation declares itself proudly South African behind a team which, 13 years after the end of apartheid, remains largely white. less

A Soweto rugby club player, left, shakes hand with a player from Johannesburg's Enkuina team. The racial divide that has rocked rugby has faded to a whisper as the nation declares itself proudly South African ... more

Photo: BENEDICTE KURZEN, ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEWSMAKERS: S. Africa uniting behind rugby team

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CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Thirteen years after the end of apartheid in South Africa, the rugby national team remains predominantly white.

While that has caused friction, the country is attempting to unite behind the team ahead of its World Cup final against England on Saturday.

In parliament Thursday, the deputy minister for Home Affairs said political pressure on rugby officials would resume after the final.

South Africa won the 1995 World Cup on home soil after being banned from international competition from 1984 to 1992. Then-President Nelson Mandela donned the green-and-gold No. 6 jersey of captain Francois Pienaar, an evocative gesture of racial reconciliation one year after the end of apartheid.

In 1995, the Springboks fielded only one mixed race player. On Saturday, the squad that sings the national anthem will include two mixed race players — wingers J.P. Pietersen and Bryan Habana. Six nonwhites were among the 30 players taken to the World Cup tournament in Paris.

Mandela, who plans to watch the final on television, said he sent the squad encouragement in different South African languages, included Afrikaans.

"We are powerfully reminded of that historic day in 1995," Mandela said in a statement issued by his foundation Thursday. "We not only won the Rugby World Cup, but more importantly we were one nation united behind our victorious team.

"We know that our boys have the ability, strength and determination to be victorious once more, because we are a winning nation."

Mandela's successor, President Thabo Mbeki, was scheduled to attend the final.

While the ANC Youth League's cheers "One Rugby Team, One nation, Our Pride," a senior ANC lawmaker threatened a few months back to strip players of passports to prevent them from traveling to France for the World Cup if there weren't more blacks on the roster.

For decades, sport in South Africa was used to showcase white power and instill a sense of inferiority in the black majority. Afrikaners, seen as the architects of apartheid, jealously guarded rugby in particular. The rugby team's Springbok emblem came to be seen as an elitist emblem of the old order.

The Mandela moment in 1995 aside, rugby has remained a source of racial tension since white rule ended. The new black government has pushed the old white guardians of sports to reform, while right-wing whites have accused the ANC of trying to take over sports, including rugby.

The sport has a strong following in the mixed-race community in the Cape Town area and among blacks in the Eastern Cape coastal province. But elsewhere in the country, the majority of the players and fans are white.

In May, parliament passed a law giving the government powers to force sports bodies to increase participation by blacks and withdraw funding from federations that don't comply.

Minister of Sports Makhinese Stofile told parliament there was too little improvement since the start of multiracial rule in 1994 and that "an element of coercion" was needed.